Thomas MacMillan Photo
Father James Manship.
Don’t just indict the cops — undo their racist false arrests.
Clergy members gathered in Fair Haven Tuesday to make that appeal in the latest twist in the ongoing saga of East Haven’s alleged widespread profiling, harassment, and false arrests of Latinos.
That announcement was made at a press conference in the basement of St. Rose of Lima Church in Fair Haven, a largely Latino parish whose members said they have suffered harassment and abuse at the hands of East Haven cops for years.
The fact that the conference took place in Fair Haven symbolized the regional nature of the ongoing dispute over policing in East Haven. A largely (but not exclusively) Ecuadorean immigrant community that settled on both sides of the border between New Haven and East Haven over the years. While New Haven officials and police have largely embraced immigrants and worked with them, East Haven’s cops made a point of harassing and brutalizing and lying about it, according to the feds.
Tuesday’s press conference comes in the wake of the recent arrests of four cops in the embattled East Haven police department, who were found by the U.S. Department of Justice to have been brutalizing Latinos and lying about it. On Monday, it was announced that East Haven police Chief Leonard Gallo will retire in the face of ongoing federal criminal and civil investigations of abuses by his department.
Father James Manship — whose 2009 arrest on false pretenses as he investigated the complaints sparked the subsequent controversy — was joined at Wednesday’s press conference by other members of CONECT, an interfaith coalition of local clergy members. Several of the faith leaders invoked the name of Dr. Martin Luther King as they called for justice for people of color in East Haven.
CONECT issued three demands, which were read by Rabbi Robert Orkand (pictured) of Temple Israel in Westport.
The first is that the state’s attorney should review all convictions based on arrests by the indicted officers since 2008. Any convictions tainted by race-based discrimination should be vacated.
The investigation should be conducted by someone other than New Haven state’s attorney Michael Dearington, said Orkand.
Father Manship raised questions about Dearington’s ability to investigate the matter since he refused to investigate the officers who arrested him even after they were shown by video evidence to have falsified the arrest report.
The East Haven Board of Police Commissioners asked the state’s attorney to investigate Manship’s arrest. Dearington replied in a letter that he was “unable to accommodate your request.”
“The bottom line is there was nothing that was done,” Manship said.
Contacted by phone Dearington, declined to comment on Manship’s remark.
“They can do what they want to do. They can make a request to me or anyone they want. I’m sure it would be duly considered,” Dearington said.
CONECT’s second demand: That East Haven implement all of the recommendations of a Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) report commission by the city in March 2011 and those of a Department of Justice report issued December 2011.
A staffer in the East Haven mayor’s office said no one was available for comment on that demand.
The group also called for an investigation into whether any officers need to be decertified for falsifying arrest reports. In the case of Father Manship’s arrest in Feb. 2009, police officers wrote that they were afraid when he pointed an “unknown shiny object” at him. Video shot by Manship later showed that the officers were aware that he was pointing a camera at them, not a weapon.
William Klein, certification officer at the Police Officers Standards and Training Council (POST), said that POST does not initiate investigations of its own, but that officers are decertified for felony convictions, making false statements, perjury, and tampering with evidence.
POST can decertify an officer prior to a felony conviction if a local department investigation finds that they made a false report. If East Haven did that now, the officers would no longer be on paid leave.
Klein said the four arrested officers are already on his “certification watch list.” He said he’s waiting to see if they are convicted.
Father Manship said he and other members of CONECT are stepping forward with the demands because there’s “a crisis of leadership” in East Haven. He drew a parallel with the public process of reconciliation following the end of apartheid in South Africa.
All nonviolent offenders should be released regardless of whether they are Latino, arrested under false premises, or other. So should many violent offenders whose crimes did not involve a gun.
The State could close more than half its prisons and reinvest those 100s of millions of dollars back into communities to prevent violent crimes (eg hiring workers from high crime areas, creating better job opportunities for at risk youth, reinvestment in foreclosed and blighted homes).
If you look just at areas where prisoners disproportionately come from, we currently spend many times more on prisons than we do on schools.
Even if the official crime rate increased slightly (as a result of more people living in our neighborhoods instead of in prisons somewhere, where crimes are not reported as crime stats), the net positive impact of closing most of our prisons would be enormous.